I am the manager of my institution’s collections database, and the primary user.  I have two questions for the collective wisdom related to ease of use:

My institution has a fairly small collection, and it is split almost evenly between objects, photographs, and archival groupings.  Object numbers started in 1961, and are numbered as [year].[number of the accession for that year].[number within that accession] for all objects and photographs.  However, prior to 2000 almost all catalog years are two digits, with a few exceptions; almost all accession and catalog numbers do not have preceding zeroes.  This makes the report maker difficult to use, as records are never listed in order and they become a headache when exported to excel.  Renumbering the PastPerfect catalog entries to have a full year and easy-to-sort accession numbers (for example, 64.1.1 to 1964.001.001) would be time-consuming, but would it be worth it?

Another question I have is related to the Deaccession screen. For those that do not use PastPerfect, when the deaccession button is pressed on an individual object’s catalog record, the record is deleted, and a placeholder is put into a different part of the database.  The deaccession screen is difficult to search, and disrupts catalog searches.  Personally, I prefer to flag a record’s status to “Deaccessioned” instead of using the deaccession button, but a person who worked before me did a mass deaccession button clicking.  There are no existing backups of the database prior to that event.  Some of the records are duplicates (including at least two 64.1.1 records, although I do not know how that happened).  Should I bring these object records back to the main database, and simply flag them as deaccessioned?

Michael R.